Rick Morgan
banner
rickmorgan.bsky.social
Rick Morgan
@rickmorgan.bsky.social
With Liberty and Justice for All | political science | data science | applied research. Co-founder of Pax Strategies. paxstrategies.com
Reposted by Rick Morgan
Is social media dying? How much has Twitter changed as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation?

Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has transformed.

Here are the key take-aways 🧵

arxiv.org/abs/2510.25417
October 30, 2025 at 8:09 AM
Reposted by Rick Morgan
Posting is correlated with affective polarization:
😡 The most partisan users — those who love their party and despise the other — are more likely to post about politics
🥊 The result? A loud angry minority dominates online politics, which itself can drive polarization (see doi.org/10.1073/pnas...)
October 30, 2025 at 8:09 AM
Reposted by Rick Morgan
A fellow furloughed coworker posted this. Laugh so you don’t cry.
October 29, 2025 at 7:24 PM
I guess a silver lining of the whole unlawful destruction of public property nonsense is that we'll have a large venue for the tribunals.
October 23, 2025 at 10:26 PM
Reposted by Rick Morgan
At Yonge & Dundas Jays fans are obeying the pedestrian scramble, as is the custom & returning to sidewalk each light cycle.
October 21, 2025 at 4:00 AM
Reposted by Rick Morgan
Two Wikipedia contributors averted a potential tragedy at a conference for the site’s editors on Friday in Manhattan when they jumped in to take down a man with a gun.
Wikipedia Volunteers Avert Tragedy by Taking Down Gunman at Conference
After the man walked onto the stage at the “Wiki World’s Fair” event and threatened to kill himself, witnesses said, two members of the audience jumped in to stop him.
nyti.ms
October 18, 2025 at 12:50 AM
Reposted by Rick Morgan
I repeat my Vance advice and say you should just add these Trump accounts to literally any and every blocklist you run even if it was meant for people who post movie spoilers and Smurfporn.
You gotta just block these accounts without interacting. They're doing this the night before No Kings so they can selectively grab quote posts and replies about how nasty people are being. It's extremely transparent. Just block and move on.
Yes, it does look like the government accounts joining Bluesky are real, including Homeland Security and the White House. They're tweeting about it on X.
October 18, 2025 at 12:53 AM
Reposted by Rick Morgan
My partner was one of the researchers on this lost wallet study. Turns out people suck less than we expect. www.npr.org/2019/06/20/7...
What Dropping 17,000 Wallets Around The Globe Can Teach Us About Honesty
Scientists used "lost" wallets to test whether people are more likely to be dishonest when they might profit. The results were puzzling — so they put more money in the wallets.
www.npr.org
October 17, 2025 at 10:18 PM
Reposted by Rick Morgan
Reposted by Rick Morgan
Amusingly, the feverish investment into data centers comes as AI adoption has *already* passed its peak in Enterprise, the AI companies themselves admit hallucination is ubfixable, and studies are revealing that workslop is not merely low-value but actually negative value for companies using AI.
"Workslop" was the logical outcome of productivity maxxing
Local throughput optimization always externalizes costs onto downstream colleagues.
productpicnic.beehiiv.com
October 11, 2025 at 2:44 PM
Reposted by Rick Morgan
"Don’t Democrats need to say, in light of new circumstances, that they will not vote to fund an administration that’s trying to impose martial law at home and to start unauthorized and unjustified wars abroad?" This has to be about more than healthcare. www.thebulwark.com/p/the-rule-o...
The Rule of Law vs. The Rule of Trump
A crisis moment in the defining debate of our time.
www.thebulwark.com
October 6, 2025 at 6:30 PM
Reposted by Rick Morgan
The Murder Of Charlie Kirk Didn’t Help Anyone

I didn’t like Charlie Kirk. His morals and principles, as expressed through his rhetoric and actions, disgusted me. I’ve no reason to mourn his death—and no plans to celebrate it. Kirk was killed in what is most likely an act of politically inspired…
The Murder Of Charlie Kirk Didn’t Help Anyone
I didn’t like Charlie Kirk. His morals and principles, as expressed through his rhetoric and actions, disgusted me. I’ve no reason to mourn his death—and no plans to celebrate it. Kirk was killed in what is most likely an act of politically inspired violence. He was shot during one of his usual speaking events; at the moment before he was shot, he was trying to link transgender people to mass casualty shootings in a way that statistics don’t bear out.
www.techdirt.com
September 11, 2025 at 4:26 PM
Reposted by Rick Morgan
I think we can all agree this isn’t just a “the left” problem, but even if we can’t, those are the facts all the same.
September 11, 2025 at 6:13 PM
New public art along my neighborhood walk route.
August 20, 2025 at 8:33 PM
Reposted by Rick Morgan
Can Cash Transfers Save Lives? Evidence from a Large-Scale Experiment in Kenya www.nber.org/papers/w34152

"Unconditional cash transfers (accounting for spillovers) lead to 48% fewer infant deaths before age one and 45% fewer child deaths before age five...concentrated among poorer households."
Can Cash Transfers Save Lives? Evidence from a Large-Scale Experiment in Kenya
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...
www.nber.org
August 18, 2025 at 8:02 PM
Reposted by Rick Morgan
The team @intsecurity.bsky.social has graciously made our article “Social Cohesion and Community Displacement in Armed Conflict” - w @danielarnon.bsky.social @rickmcalexander.bsky.social - free for this week only! Access it here:

direct.mit.edu/isec/article...
Social Cohesion and Community Displacement in Armed Conflict
Abstract. What are the origins of conflict-related population displacement? Why do some communities in conflict zones suffer mass casualties while others evade conflict violence? Whether civilians mig...
direct.mit.edu
August 18, 2025 at 2:37 PM
Reposted by Rick Morgan
I wrote about how AI chatbots are pumping out fake quotes, attributed to real people, at scale, and polluting our public disourse with potemkin pontification and made-up appeals to authority. And the AIs are not just misquoting famous people—it happened to me and it could happen to you. Gift link:
Don’t Believe What AI Told You I Said
The chatbots are lying about me.
www.theatlantic.com
August 15, 2025 at 5:34 PM
Reposted by Rick Morgan
I’m shocked and disappointed at how quickly everybody reverts to « Ru is a great power » and « great powers will decide Ukraine’s fate » against the ample evidence that Ukraine holds its own and Ru cannot advance and cannot militarily compel the capitulation that it keeps asking for.
August 8, 2025 at 1:53 AM
Reposted by Rick Morgan
star wars but in the wrong movies: thread
August 3, 2025 at 5:35 PM
Reposted by Rick Morgan
What drives differences between the conflict events datasets UCDP and ACLED? Contrary to previous claims, @magnusoberg.bsky.social and Mert Can Yilmaz find most differences are due to auxiliary coding rules and standards for source evaluation, not sourcing strategies or inclusion thresholds.
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
journals.sagepub.com
August 1, 2025 at 9:51 PM
Reposted by Rick Morgan
Holy shit, they did it. They wrote the headline.
July 30, 2025 at 1:10 AM
Reposted by Rick Morgan
Forget the $20 cocktail. These bars and restaurants are serving martinis for $8 or less.
Dirt Cheap Martinis Are DC’s Best New Trend
Forget the $20 cocktail. These bars and restaurants are serving martinis for $8 or less.
www.washingtonian.com
July 26, 2025 at 11:04 PM
Reposted by Rick Morgan
July 26, 2025 at 4:51 PM
Reposted by Rick Morgan
Sometimes a meme manages to combine the two most memable stories of hte month
July 24, 2025 at 1:41 AM
Reposted by Rick Morgan
This is the first time I’ve seen these kind of “you don’t know what you don’t know” issues in coding to a degree that I’ve seen them in law, and it’s the same structural issue — when you get down to it, you have to be the kind of expert that the AI promises to replace to be able to use it safely
July 20, 2025 at 6:47 PM